You miss my point. What mens advocacy groups are missing is that they aren’t doing the primary work required. They just kind of expect that stating the issues are enough.

Like let’s take the mens shelter thing. Cool. I agree… So Where do I donate? Who is doing the admin? What’s the aim, the targets. What is the method? Who’s talking to the accountants and doing the paperwork and signing the papers. Are you seeking a grant? Who’s filing it? Who’s name is on the lease for the property? Who do I contact to volunteer my time?

… Wait you want me to be that guy who creates all that framework? You want me to pay for the lawyers and, wrangle the committee and spend my nights arranging experts and to set up the charity? Okay… Why me exactly? I am a transmasc non-binary person fighting for my union to cover trans healthcare and showing up to city halls to stop book bans and bathroom bills. I totally have like 5 hours free on a Tuesday you can have or maybe $50 out of my pocket to an organized cause but that’s not exactly gunna help you unless someone does the framework to make that useful…and I am sorry but like hell am not about to throw myself on that particular beaurcratic sword. Doing that for a cause that directly effects my security to exist in public is hard enough.

Saying “we should have men’s shelters” is not giving someone a actionable task. People love actionable tasks! They are easy : show up here and protest, go here and donate, go here to run a fundraiser, volunteer here sign this petition etc etc etc… But jist plunking "We need mens shelters somewhere is basically low key implying you aren’t personally asking the listener to do anything. Like I can totally agree all these things are worthy endeavors… But you aren’t giving me a framework here for my endorsement to translate into anything helpful. Okay. Shelters got it I agree. Job done, argument won. Victory. Woo.

Doing the primary work is not fun or intuitive or easy. But what it CAN be is managed by a very small team. The initial investment is always in personal time money and extreme frustration and growing the thing takes patience.

Look to the LGBTQIA model and you will find a myriad of different small independent groups generally focused around singular letters of the acronym who have a diehard core and damn near always the people who founded them were the people who experienced the problem directly or the surviving loved ones of people who died. The circle of secondary supporters are usually more varied but the Leaders basically need to be able to devote at least around 100 man hours apeice per year doing pretty intense work that involves a lot of key decision making. If you really are fired up about making this thing real that’s the bit that needs to be done so other people can push it. Or find someone already doing the thing and support them. Amplify their message and organization. Grow them.

Allies are also more likely if you create solidarity. Try partnering with a women’s shelter group to learn their process, reach out to the Gay community to tap their activism networks by explaining how your interests intersect, cross promote. Be prepared to reciprocate. Nobody likes selfish people who take up all the oxygen in the room. People will find time to help people who make reasonable direct asks that respect the time and resources needed to attend to their own admin first.

But in general I don’t see this engagement style from cis straight men’s activism groups. A lot of the time they seem to be fairly unhealthy because they just want to ruminate on how life sucks while practically nobody steps up to the plate to do the critical and nessisary front work. I just hear “women don’t care”, “nobody cares” “this should happen”… But what I NEVER hear “Okay, here’s our plan. Let’s meet.” “do this.” “support this.” “here’s how to effectively ask for this”, “support this court case” “I’m throwing a fundraiser” “let’s build our own shelter”… If you aren’t asking these things of each other then you have zero business demanding it of anyone else.

And if someone comes at me with “well I DO run or support a thing but nobody seems to care…” there’s usually some kind of reason why people aren’t latching. Chances are good if you aren’t crowing your most modest successes as wins and keeping hope and optimism as your center people are going to doubt your ability to deliver on your intentions. You can’t afford to mope, you need to change your approach, experiment and figure out what your winning formula is, replicate it, amplify it CELEBRATE it.

Because if no one actually cares… If that actually is the implicit nature of the world there is no sense in complaining. You are fucked.

I keep wanting to light a fire under your asses. These things are worth fighting for but so often you don’t realize what you are doing to yourselves. You keep reinforcing your learned helplessness. Get boots on the fucking ground already!

If you can’t find someone doing the admin for the thing that’s your ride or die issue then you have to create one and chances are good that person is gunna have to be you. Nobody is generally lining up to take that gig… You can keep trying to convince rando people to try and take on your heaviest burdens but chances are all its going to do is make you angry when they just shoulder their own pack leaving you with nothing but a few kind words of encouragement before moving on down the road. You get a lot more faith in humanity when you hand them an item or two from your pack to carry for you as most people will help you out under that circumstance.

That’s not quite what I mean. It’s not that they are enemies of each other it is just that reciprocity is a road to success. A lot of the LGBTQIA for instance is solidarity based. Everyone has their main concern that focuses their own needs. Like folks who push for asexual stuff is different than say trans stuff. You wouldn’t go to an allosexual trans person to get your marching orders for organizing for Ace things or vice versa. They have independent agendas and groups who do the main work. Successful adgendas put in the primary effort and give lower effort tasks to do to allies.

Like okay, example. There’s the regular list of regular concerns from men’s advocacy groups. Education accommodations to close gaps for students and resources for domestic abuse shelters for men. Those are two very common issues. On their own however it doesn’t matter how often you say it, I could agree with you those would be good thing but that isn’t enough…

You need someone dedicated to actually create the initiative. Maybe organize a group of psychology professionals to advocate to a school board for changes or set up a non-profit to get shelters going… Governments generally only adopt things once a model has been tested so just getting shit done to prove your model has to usually be grassroots : That’s the stuff that a primary organizer does. It’s tough work. It takes a lot of free time and dedication. There’s admin aspects where you need to talk to professionals, get a dedicated core of like minded people together and point them in a direction, deal with a lot of very impassioned ideas clashing against each other and hours of effort. It’s a frustrating blood, sweat and tears endeavor. Most people have the energy at most to do one of these maybe two during their lifetime. A lot of people can’t manage it even once. Chances are nobody is going to sign on to help you with this generally unless they got enough skin in your game.

Look back at the history of the LGBTQIA and you will find hundreds of fairly small groups working this way for very specific initiatives. The main people of those group’s cores are usually either people of that specific queer minority who are directly effected or family or friends of a minority member who died.

But what a primary group creates is secondary tasks. Maybe they create the charity that does the main work and other people who want to help but don’t have time to volunteer kick money into it. The primary group organizes the protest and post the posters and reach out to allies… and all the allies need to do is show up.

With a lot of men’s advocacy groups there’s this toothless helplessness where they aren’t asking people to join in to do secondary tasks. They just state problems that exist. It kind of comes across to groups that are more used to organizing like they aren’t giving trying to give someone a job they are trying to convince you to start their small business for them from scratch.

Depends on the approach. In a lot of queer friendly spaces men’s issues are generally accepted as incredibly valid as gay and trans men tend to get pretty hardcore beat down by failing to pass the bar of the expectations of cultural masculinity and on average they require more outside help from services or others because they are less likely to be able to return to their families to escape abusive relationships and face addictional precarity.

But the difference tends to be a general understanding that while women definitely get it and can absolutely sympathize they also aren’t in a particularly great position to change things in a general sense because women also have to regularly fight against social power of systems that depower their autonomy that are fronted by men and they generally have to see to their own needs before being able to do the administrative work on men’s behalf.

It’s emergency airplane crash logic. Put your own supply of air on before you help the person next to you. If your job, legislature, judicial system and potential funding structure is only made up of a minority of women you are asking a lot of people who don’t have institutional power to flex even on their own behalf and a lot of women have deep seated anger regarding that disparity so when someone tries to pile more on their plates the gut reaction is to throw it back. Women might be willing to assist, but they aren’t going to accept doing the lions share of the required admin for another group when they have other priorities. The same goes for queer groups, racial minority groups, religious minorities, disability affected groups and so on. They might have room on their plate to show up to your protest… But usually that requires you to you show a willingness to reciprocate and show up to theirs.

Kyriarchical oppression.

Kyriarchy refers to the overlap of various inequalities caused by gender, race, sexuallity and disability describing overlaps of cross sectionality. It also refers to the practice of problems created by assumed superiority.

A lot of the fear of “conversion” really feels like parents getting ornery because someone might “damage their property” by telling them that being gay is perfectly fine. They want to have the whole heterosexual experience they had but lived vicariously all over again through someone they can pilot through life like a little low maintenance automoton. They want to narrow the field of choices to the ones they want.

You see it expressed all over the place. If you choose not to want kids or marry, pick a career they don’t understand or would pick for themselves they tighten the thumbscrews. So often they don’t love their kids they just love what they represent… Genetic legacy or bragging rights or a vehicle for constant validation. Being LGBTQIA+ is a threat because that represents paths that they would not have chosen. They can’t empathize or desire it…

But estrangement has always been a thing. Kids always become adults and adults always have choices… but we never forget what it was like to be a kid without autonomy. One day that kid is going to be able to make their own choices and there’s not a thing their parent can do about it. I love and value my parents because they always treated me like my own person. I always consider their advice seriously and give them a high priority. Fillial piety is no burden when it feels like returning the support and love. It never sits uneasy. I know a lot of people who struggle because they are biologically programmed to have a bond but they just can’t because the choices their parents made amd continue to attempt to make for them has left lasting damage.

I am not sure that’s entirely it. Like… Those “exclusive neighbourhoods” basically just means “has fence and security system”. If you didn’t care about getting caught - basically spree killer style martyrdom- there isn’t much to stop you. Most CEOs are notorious creatures of habit and they publicize where they will be fairly regularly. Just hang out by the right golf course and you’ll find em.

I think it’s just a different mindset. Maybe picking a specific target is more of a cold blooded logic killer thing not a hot blooded spree killer thing and the two require entirely separate buy ins? Or the target type is the difference. Spree killers tend to pick big populations for shock value or because it represents a wider social movement. They also take a bunch of people with them which probably satisfies a feeling of making it “worth it”. It is kind of a “fuck that guy in particular” kind of premeditation you would need combined with a conviction to essentially light yourself on fire to burn someone else… And a one to one trade isn’t exactly a feel good catharsis.

I don’t think it’s a matter that a couple of isolated incidents wouldn’t cause a panic or not be consequential on a wider scale. I feel like the allure of extreme wealth would lose it’s luster pretty fast if suddenly people felt the need to have extreme security details all the time. I don’t think it would stop people from dragon hording but it wouldn’t take too many incidents before they all would be too afraid to walk to the corner to grab a coffee in person at least for awhile. Generally being rich comes with the idea that it gives you more freedom, not less.

I think it’s something on the horizon though. A lot of the language around the extreme wealthy is pretty dehumanizing. Like “He seems like a robot” or “souless narcissistic dirtbag” or “eat the rich” type rhetoric is pretty normalized. I think it’s just most people value themselves more highly then taking out a single CEO regardless of the differing scope of individual impacts. We are kind of wired to look at the extreme wealthy as both above and apart in ability to impact the world stage… While simultaneously being kind of non-special people who aren’t more or less worthwhile than we ourselves. It might just be that there’s still enough hope around that things will change through non-violent means… But I think it is something more about the basic mental math.

I personally just hope we can tax the everliving bajeezus out of them and start some sensible basic quality of life initiatives and electoral reform before it starts getting properly ugly.

I realize this is gunna make me sound fairly radical and murdery, but it’s more legit curiousity…

I sometimes wonder why out of all the people living in misery why someone hasn’t gone on to just pick a CEO and… assassinate them? Like they are generally not super well protected. They aren’t living like spies with people tasting their food for poison or anything.

People have been losing their patience with Corporate wealth for a long time and talking pitchforks for decades but it’s not like these people are untouchable and unknowable. A lot of this stuff is fairly public information. I figure the prerequisites for stochastic terrorism would be pretty ripe but like… Why haven’t we heard about even one case? Is it just too personal you think? What is the threshold for domestic terrorist incidents? Why do we see all these lone wolf gunman going after schools and clubs because they have been made so VERY angry… but not tracking down singular people? Is it a different psychological requirement?

I find it very strange as someone as comfortably far away from French Canada one can be while still being on the continent that I technically am described as French by this diagram. I failed French so hard in 8th grade my teacher passed me on the promise that I never take another French class.

Who wants to deal with people on a day off?

I think at that point you wander into whatever the architectural equivalent of Zombie Formalism is.

That’s kind of my reasoning for thinking this whole bear thing is out of proportion. I grew up knowing how to deal with bears. If you’re talking black bear you make a bunch of scary confusing noise and look big or… If you are already noisy they just steer clear and leave you the fuck alone. You gotta be pretty deep woods to encounter Grizzlies and most of the time they are chill. If they aren’t, play dead or go up a tree.

I don’t care if all a rando person, male, female non-binary whatever - does is try and strike up a conversation, I don’t go to the woods to socialize. Act like a proper bear and gimme my gorram space!

I would argue that the connection is a lot older than Nazis. The era around 1250 responded to a nasty wave of the Black death by Christian leaders collaborating to simultaneously fight the population decline by criminalizing abortion friendly midwifery and ostracize and subjugate gender and sexual minorities because they feared the collapse of society due to a population bust. As such what was taught by the church up to that point began to get new connotations. Jewish populations were persecuted and killed as scapegoats for the cause of the plague. Folk medicine women and non-conforming men were killed and condemned for witchcraft. While women stepped up to fill the roles of men during the plague once the population was rebounding their power of place in society was to be broken as the Church leaned on it’s misogynistic practices and preached of the dangers to society and the family…

Nazisim is just a more modern echo of well established means to break the power of non compliant of groups who can be scapegoated or subjugated into subservience to Christians who feel threatened, a group that centers nominally celebate and wealthy men whose only contact with women is in a subordinate role.

So… The law isn’t static. With the previous Supreme Court ruling lending more power to the constitutional right to own and carry guns all those laws that you mentioned that originally banned him no longer have rock solid ground for existing at all.

Basically a state can pass any law it likes, it’s only once it gets used against someone that it can go through the process of being tested as a valid law by punch testing it’s capacity as constitutional violation. If there is a change to the precedent of the Constitution then then anything still in the appeals process can invoke the law as long as they can bring up reasonable proof that a current trial can support questions of constitutional violations.

His defense was basically capitalizing on a change in the law to bring into question every gun law on the books that was, prior to the new Supreme Court ruling was considered fairly standard… If the Supreme Court judged the state law in conflict with the new established constitutional interpretation basically the arrest isn’t valid and the persecution would have to reconstruct the case from scratch and re-trial… And creating a domino effect potentially destroying all state gun restrictions. It’s not surprising that they ruled how they did. They’d get so much kickback…

If someone’s fundamental rights are violated in the process of enacting the law the trial conviction is considered invalid. So he’s kind of has been under shrodinger’s conviction for a federal crime, neither considered a vaild nor invalid convict until this box was opened.

Conspiracies that require absolute lock tight secrecy to function at a basic level aren’t generally tenable to be sustained for longer than a handful of years at a time at most. Somebody always fucks up or basically was just lucky nobody checked for awhile. The nessesity of any large scale collaboration creates inefficiencies and potential error points in the system. Even the best of the best spy agencies fuck up and get caught rather routinely, particularly when operating on their home soil. A lot of investigative journalists accidentally trip over stuff all the time but have good faith arrangements (or in some places laws) to not disclose the active manoeuvres of the state to the public.

It’s just really hard for humans in general to accept that events that effected them or things they care about very deeply personally weren’t somehow also grand in design. Grocking sometimes it really is just random chance or stupid mishandling is not something we’re well wired to handle. Stories of all powerful conspiracies masterminding the world scratch that itch… But logistically speaking the conspiracy aspect is completely unnecessary. If someone is trying to blame a nebulous bogeymen who exists as nameless, numberless ultimately wealthy but also totally off the books super spies… chances are they are just trying to capitalize on making you feel flattered, smart and empowered by something “only you are smart enough to believe” - while feeding you bullshit they can personally profit from in some way with you none the wiser.

You are unlikely to if you aren’t in Canada. It seems like Indigenous folk down in the States don’t have quite as much success spreading widespread awareness. I produced some stuff and had to explain to a bunch of Americans what a land acknowledgement was. For the past 5 years where I am they are performed before any meeting or performance. Up here 2S gets top billing at the beginning of the LGBTQIA initnialism to give deference to gender categories that were suppressed by European supremacist colonization.

Yes you did do it right, lol…and pokemon is pronounced Po- kay (or like Quay) and the same mon as in monster.

And I absolutely don’t intend to put you on blast. It’s just you can kind of look at language as a kind of technology. That tech can be used to spot minute differences to inform people of a lot of things… Trans people often have to live a little bit like spies in high risk situations so dogwhistles can actually be helpful technology to us assess an environment and risks. Muddying the water can actually make things harder.

Like I for instance pass mostly as a cis person… though not in the way I would hope for. I am not physically transitioning for partner related reasons so while a lot of people can suspect I am some kind of queer they often falsely assume my gender and pronouns based on my body.

Because I am always working with new people I basically take mental hits every all day at work that other people are entirely unaware of. It tends to absolutely wreck my self esteem and makes me feel really isolated…But it’s sometimes safer than being “out”. People who make a mistake because they don’t know are trans are a lot easier to deal with then people who know and aren’t adapting well. Like when someone is making a bunch of mistakes with my pronouns it brings way more attention to the fact their brains do not register me as my gender and they are undertaking an artificial process. When they undergo that process I have to work a little harder to teach, and let them know that I am okay, that I understand, reassure them they are doing fine… It takes a lot out of me to do. EVERYONE fucks up pronoun changes. Coming out and getting people used to me is work that I am gunna be doing over and over and over. If I am gunna have to do that I am gunna pick candidates who I know will be worth the personal effort of onboarding or who make my job easier who already have the playbook down and just haven’t put it into practice.

Currently I am out selectively only to people I judge as safe. How I judge rather people are safe are not is by how they comport themselves. What sort of language they use, how attentive they are when I use they/them pronouns when referring to friends of mine when trading stories, how they react to different conversational topics, what do they find funny and how willing they are to defer to someone else’s needs… It could be veganism, or a religious practice done for comfort or making adjustments for a person with a disability, if you show that you are willing to make concessions or small behavioural changes because you value other people’s comfort that’s a MAJOR green flag.

It sucks but I am literally running an active risk assessment of everyone I meet in a professional setting. I do this because even if they aren’t actively bigoted they can make my life a hell.

I had a boss who just wanted to debate trans talking points all the time while we could not leave our posts and I lived in constant fear he’d figure me out… because becoming his personal entrapped ambassador for a community he had zero understanding of was going to add way more patience and effort just to get through my day than any of my coworkers would be required to muster. I would likely lose my job because even if he was not intentionally mean dealing with being the subject of his intensified curiosity and questions that are generally invasive would drive me to either need to leave or do something that would get me fired.

We trans folk are generally skittish of folk who take a little too much interest in us because of our transness. It’s can be a lot of work to just get people to calm down, not be self conscious around us like you’re scared doing of something wrong and not treat us as special. Just making us feel like comfortably normal people doing regular people things is a wonderful gift. In the case of your store based acquaintance it’s generally safer to like compliment her clothes or jewelry or something. It’s like saying “I think you’re cool” without making her feel self conscious that people are staring at aspects herself that trigger that fear of being observed as something abnormal.

So if it helps think of the adaptation as learning to speak trans safety code. If you are saying “trans people” in an office full of co-workers who use “transgenders” you are using language technology to fly your green flag in a sea of ambiguously checkered red. We’ll spot you.

The thing about that… Is that whether or not something registers as cool or not generally needs to come from the group. As an example you could try to “take back” an n-slur from bigoted use … but if that initiative isn’t coming from the community to whom that term is levied you are basically just using an n-slur because you believe yourself entitled to use the slur for your own personal reasons.

It’s not just about sticking it to the Conservatives, it’s about listening to the why that comes from a community that is often talked about rather than talked directly to… At best trans people who hear you are going to think you are out completely of touch like people who pronounce pokemon like “Poh-key-man”… Or that you cannot be counted on to listen, that you are a different kind if problem and you are someone to hide from being openly trans around if they can because it’s ultimately safer than rolling the dice against whether you are a transphobe or not. Places (for example a work place) where terms like “transgenders” is openly used without challenge from other people is a message to us that that community is either not safe or at least very very ignorant… And that self advocating in that environment is going to be an uphill struggle of dealing with people who are convinced they know what’s best for us more than we do…

The concept of the European style family is a tool of conservative control. When you create specific boundaries on what is considered kinship you create subjects of economic categories. If you get a bunch of kickbacks for playing by the rules then there are also people who are purposefully excluded from playing to create additional economic goads. Like if you are disowned from your family you can lose generational wealth and support which is designed to keep young people in line by way of fear . Welfare and social securities weakens the economic ties of the family politic control to make you reliant on the support of the people you are related to by blood and to keep people who might be your chosen family at a distance unable to help.

So called “family values” aren’t lovely dovey nice things. They are to make being an individual with different needs a failure state.

At the same time Stonehenge has some delicate evidence of ancient painted designs that requires special imaging equipment to detect that may have been wiped out bu this. There’s a reason why they tend to keep people at a distance from the thing.